As users increase online activities of uploading content and downloading content via the web, the number of available documents being downloaded to servers and individual computer systems increases. The content may include documents having characters and glyphs generated using particular fonts. Such documents may be drafted using any number of fonts pertaining to formats associated with a variety of application programs hosting the documents.
In general, a character may refer to a general concept of a letter, symbol, umber, ideograph, etc. without reference to a particular font. A glyph may refer to a specific instance of a character in a particular font. A collection of related fonts having different weights and/or point sizes may be referred to as a typeface. Digital typefaces and fonts generally include instructions for rendering characters on an output device, such as a display device, printer, scanner, and/or other output device. Each font may include a character set that contains punctuation marks, numerals, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and/or other printable characters.
Rendering of characters in real time as a data stream is passed to an output device may result in missing characters if the particular device does not have access to a font used to generate the character. For example, some characters, such as Greek letters, are used infrequently and are not included in many fonts. As a result, an unusual character may be represented by a place-holder symbol when rendered to the output device. In some examples, the output device displays a character that does not fit esthetically with the other characters in the font.
Users may utilize known fonts and/or create new fonts. Other users may wish to download documents generated using the known or new fonts. If the computer system downloading a particular document does not have access to such a font, errors, symbols, or other unwanted remnants may be placed into the document because a particular format for the character may not be available on the computer system. There exists a need for a method and apparatus to intelligently select a font replacement for missing glyphs within documents.